Come spend a night on the lanes and show your support for Visual AIDS!

Founded in 1988 by arts
professionals as a response to the effects of AIDS on the arts
community and as a way of organizing artists, arts institutions, and
arts audiences towards direct action, Visual AIDS has evolved into an
arts organization with a two-pronged mission. 1) Through the Frank
Moore Archive Project, the largest slide library of work by artists
living with HIV and the estates of artists who have died of AIDS,
Visual AIDS historicizes the contributions of visual artists with HIV
while supporting their ability to continue making art and furthering
their professional careers. 2) In collaboration with museums,
galleries, artists, schools, and AIDS service and advocacy
organizations, Visual AIDS produces exhibitions, publications, and
events utilizing visual art to spread the message "AIDS IS NOT OVER."

[Marclay] says he looked into legal action but was assured
by his lawyer "there's nothing I can do about it. They have the right
to get inspired." Of course, in other cases, such obvious "inspiration"
might be called copyright infringement. In this instance, however,
Marclay's rights may be limited as his own film consisted of
copyrighted works by other artists.

I like Apple. I like Marclay. What Apple did was sleazy.

[sleazy? newsgrist begs to differ on that one... this is what advertising does all the time: it remixes art. and why not?]

But does it
strike anyone else as a tad hypocritical that Marclay's complaining
about Apple 'stealing' his video when his video is made from 'stealing'
other peoples copyrighted work? I don’t know how the hell he thinks he
can sue. The idea of stringing a bunch of telephone hellos together
isnt copyrightable and shouldn't be.

March 28, 2007

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing
the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said
Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in
Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual
memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of
effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than
their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections.
They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging,
the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com.
In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that
describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a
user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections
by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional
documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution
and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype
tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other
museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30
images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were
compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent
of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's
ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the
expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said
Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the
Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based
on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum
tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the
Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began
last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and
includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site;
some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands
of works,
there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one,
"art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the
visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the
grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the
Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the
picture." [read on...]

March 25, 2007

The Artist Tax Deduction Bill is finally up for action. Please take the time to support this important bill as its passage will impact all individual artists. Go to the link below to send a message to your representatives and senators. Please forward this information to your mailing list!Artist Deduction Bill Introduced in the House03-19-2007: After announcing at the Congressional Arts Breakfast on Arts Advocacy Day that he would be the lead sponsor for the Artist Deduction Bill, Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) introduced the bill on March 14, 2007, joined by Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-MN). Identical to a Senate bill introduced by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Robert Bennett (R-UT), the bill supports individual artists by allowing them to take a fair-market value tax deduction for tangible works they donate to nonprofit collecting and educational organizations, and it benefits the public by giving them access to more art.

[...] Warhol's art of war is the climax to Camouflage, an exhibition that tells the story of how cubism inspired a new approach to military designs and uniforms in the 20th century. This revolution in European art just preceded the first world war: from 1909 onwards, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque took the European conventions of the picture apart, destroying perspective and turning appearances inside-out. Their paintings were nicknamed "cubist" and by 1914 cubism was notorious; its jagged, broken appearance seemed abstract at first glance, though was actually profoundly concerned with representation. When war broke out, this new art gave birth to a military invention that still shapes our visual culture today.

Traditional armies flaunted visibility. Banners fluttered, cavalries massed, infantry donned bright red coats. By the end of 1914, a conflict expected to be "over by Christmas" turned into a nightmare stalemate. This new war fought from trenches made soldiers want to vanish into the mud. One terror was aerial photography. How could artillery positions be concealed from cameras in the sky? Soldiers who had been artists before the war remembered seeing cubist paintings - and started to experiment with fragmented patterns on field guns and uniforms.CRW Nevinson's 1917 painting A Tank shows an early British lozenge-shaped tank painted with a radical, modernist pattern in orange, green and black: it's impossible to miss the cubist look of such early camouflage. The Sphere magazine in 1918 tried to explain the origin of the new word "camouflage", tracing it to a 17th century French expression for a malevolent puff of smoke. At sea, Norman Wilkinson, a painter of traditional seascapes, led a group that decorated British dreadnoughts with diagonal, high-contrast "dazzle" patterns. Wilkinson and other British pioneers were no fans of the avant garde, but war made modernists of them. "We did that!" Picasso is supposed to have said when he saw a camouflaged gun.